Bungie Working On Improving Destiny 2 Console Load Times

Long load times have been a thorn in the sides of gamers for years. Since the release of Forsaken, Destiny 2 has been particularly bad when it comes to loading into the game on consoles, but Bungie is hoping to fix the issue in the upcoming Season 5 update.

Bungie Engineer Ben Thompson addressed the long load times in a blog post on Bungie.net, stating, “We have been paying close attention to reports of long load times on console and are working on improvements to reduce these load times.”

Thompson also acknowledged three key areas where the load times were an issue for Destiny 2, including the startup and character selection screens, loading into activities, and while in the game’s inventory and UI tabs. The developer won’t be fixing the character selection load times quite yet but did promise significant improvements while loading into activities and traveling throughout a location. For instance, load times into the EDZ should be reduced from over 2 minutes down to a little over 1 minute.

Hopefully, Bungie will be able to sort out the game’s initial load times as well, as those are easily the most frustrating. As for why the load times are so extreme in the first place, Bungie blamed the frequency at which content patches are made available, which Bungie says has “translated into some unexpected overhead for the code that is responsible for loading data into the game.” There’s likely a lot more going on behind the scenes, but at least Bungie knows where the issues lie.

With Activision stating that Destiny 2 isn’t meeting expectations, it wouldn’t be too surprising to see Bungie upping their efforts as far as quality of life improvements are concerned. Load times are a great place to start too, as they’re one of the most aggravating aspects of any game.

There’s still plenty for players to do before Season 4 ends on November 27th, but they’ll have to deal with the usual long load times until then. The team is still investigating the issues with initial load times, but Bungie should have more to say on that as soon as they find a solution.